Pursuits of Knowledge - Kalela Williams on "Tangleroot"

“Discover the truth that a whole town buried” in Kalela Williams’ young adult fiction offering on Black history and heritage.

Noni Reid has grown up in the shadow of her mother, Dr. Radiance Castine, renowned scholar of Black literature, who is alarmingly perfect at just about everything.

When Dr. Castine takes a job as the president of the prestigious Stonepost College in rural Virginia, Noni is forced to leave her New England home and, most importantly, a prime internship and her friends. She and her mother move into the “big house” on Tangleroot Plantation.

Tangleroot was built by one of Noni’s ancestors, an enslaved man named Cuffee Fortune―who Dr. Castine believes was also the original founder of Stonepost College, and that the school was originally formed for Black students. Dr. Castine spends much of her time trying to piece together enough undeniable truth in order to change the name of the school in Cuffee’s honor―and to force the university to reckon with its own racist past.

Meanwhile, Noni hates everything about her new home, but finds herself morbidly fascinated by the white, slaveholding family who once lived in it. Slowly, she begins to unpeel the layers of sinister history that envelop her Virginia town, her mother’s workplace, her ancestry―and her life story as she knew it. Through it all, she must navigate the ancient prejudices of the citizens in her small town, and ultimately, she finds herself both affirming her mother’s position and her own―but also discovering a secret that changes everything.

Tangleroot was born of extensive research. As Williams shaped the voices in the narrative, she relied on primary sources like letters and diaries. In crafting the setting, Williams visited historic homes and sites and consulted numerous books and online resources. Monticello was one of the sites Williams visited, and profiles of Monticello's enslaved people, held within the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia, were important resources as she envisioned the lives of fictional characters in her book.

Kalela Williams is an author, a proud auntie, a cat mama, and a history enthusiast. She is the Director of Virginia Humanities' Virginia Center for the Book, which produces the Virginia Festival of the Book; and she previously worked in literary and historical public programming in Philadelphia for more than a decade. Originally from Atlanta, Georgia, Kalela now calls the Central Virginia town of Staunton, Virginia, home, where she and her partner run a community arts organization, The Off Center. Tangleroot is Kalela's debut novel.